


I'll Meet You There

by apparentlytaboo



Series: Goodnight Death [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Original Character(s), Outer Space, Sonic Screwdriver
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 07:48:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18494542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparentlytaboo/pseuds/apparentlytaboo
Summary: A long time ago I met a man on an uninhabitable planet, made of glass and light. His memories helped make me who I am today, a Stranger wandering the stars and trying to leave something better in my wake. Years later on this far-flung ship, I will finally get the chance to meet him once more.orThe Doctor met with more than a monster in that ruined bus on the planet Midnight. Much more.*Spoilers through Journey's End*





	I'll Meet You There

**Author's Note:**

> Though it can be read alone, this builds upon the character introduced in 'The Stranger,' who is my answer to the question of "what exactly did the Doctor encounter on the planet Midnight?" For the Stranger, this story picks up right after their introduction and provides a look at the events leading up to their creation from the perspective of their 'father.' In the Doctor's timeline, this piece occurs just after he loses Donna to her memories.

"Out beyond ideas

of wrongdoing

and rightdoing,

there is a field."

-RUMI

 

_The Void_

A long time ago I met a man on an uninhabitable planet, made of glass and light. Moments after being tackled from the torn metal of the tour bus, the stewardess clings to the body I have stolen as the elements begin to tear us apart.

 **Overwhelmed.**  That word has meaning, more than that it  **describes**  the cacophony tearing through me. Me. A sense of self. I am. I think and I  **am**. The humans had seen me. My flesh pulls a final pocket of air into its meat, the outermost layer of the body smoking as galvanic radiation mercilessly incinerates us. She is screaming. There is no sound, but the words pounding through me categorize her expression as  **anguish,**  face pinched, mouth gaping open over calcium deposits and the flesh of our two bodies merge together as they melt. Soon the eyes are gone, gelatinous and evaporating. The impression of the human’s death mask stays with me, the final bite of information transferred over as the synapses fire one last time before every trace of life is scorched away from us completely.

The extonic stars continue to illuminate the diamond planes below them, unconcerned with the happenings upon the planet’s surface. A thought form ripples past on the celestial winds, running far from the metal box, the Doctor, the unmarked and unremarkable graves behind it. Out to the darkness between the stars it runs, and writhes, assimilating.

***

As far as interstellar travel goes, this shuttle is a far cry from the technological marvels responsible for seeding life throughout the farther reaches of the cosmos. That having been said, it’s nothing to shake a stick at, with quad-solar turbine inductors pulling in energy from ambient space, two reserve drives running off self-generated dark matter for transit through large pockets between nebulae devoid of radiation. The hull is as sturdy as them come; not building for beauty, the engineers pumped every last drop of resources into making the life support systems more robust. I look up through the glass portholes in the ceiling at the spectacular light show above; a Technicolor effect as the shields effortlessly break down an inclement meteor shower that could tear a lesser hulk to shreds, leaving a glittering trail of harmless space dust in the ship’s wake. In a word, this ship is  _beautiful_.

I trail my hand along the wall to feel the healthy hum of the operating systems thrumming in the polished metal, picking my way past shipping containers and locking straps as I carefully negotiate what appears to be a small storage space. The meteor shower provides plenty of light by which to identify a small hatch set in an alcove near the larger garage style doors used to move the cargo. Landing in a disused area is a good start and I smile at my good fortune; appearing out of thin air tends to raise any number of questions when witnessed, and I hope my luck holds as I scuttle up to examine the control panel in the shifting light. The panel flashes amber the moment my fingertips graze its surface and my shoulders droop as luck decides to drop me like a hot rock back into the stream. I press my forehead into the metal of the wall above the panel, focusing on the way the vibrations transmit through the spongy texture of my skin to reverberate through my skull, and I pick apart the harmonics of the separate materials in the quiet moment just before the klaxon deafens me. Emergency lights kick on to throw bright amber stripes across the shield’s chromatic display.

***

_The Void_

The quiet here is oppressive after the noise inside the human's heads. The silence settles through me, and I follow its path past small storms of thought, getting pulled here and there into eddies of perception, tidal pools of memories coalescing into frozen moments. Compressed like this the information blurs together, too much to take in. I concentrate, pushing everything I collected from them away in my own approximation of a big bang. Flattening out the image, I form them into the shape of a galaxy spreading out in long tails with my ‘self’ at the epicenter: the black hole into which all things will eventually fall. One at a time and in no manner of order I begin to draw them in, immersing myself in each memory individually to absorb everything I can, and then inter them in my memory.

At once, the notion of order strikes me. These occurrences were experienced by the Doctor in a set order, each happening only once and building upon the moment that preceded it. They are  _chronological_. I shift perspective again, reshuffling the billion points of light in my mind into the correct order.

As the process continues, I begin connecting dots into a complicated web-frame, words with associated images, additional meanings derived from interaction. Different forms of life, crawling, flying, slithering along the ground. I begin to differentiate between them, each with their unique characteristics. Eventually I can assign meaning to a face; a unique collection of features used to identify an individual. They have their own voices as well, peculiar patterns behind their actions.

Names take longer, but once I grasp the concept my understanding accelerates. Every person the Doctor meets he seems to remember, but some hold more gravity than others. They appear in greater frequency, their names bolder in his memories. Rose Tyler has golden hair and laughs loud enough to quiet his fears. She looks at the world with a fresh wonder that the Doctor had been slowly losing in himself. She is beautiful. She is magnificent. And then she is lost. The Captain is something else entirely, singular and magnificent. A fixed point in ever changing space time. A brash woman with brilliant red hair, a girl on the moon and so very many others… through his eyes I begin to understand who they are. Through his eyes, I love them, just a he did. As the last dredges are consumed, I wonder; who am I?

I do not know.

***

“And who are you, then?” An incredulous voice demands in accented galactic, using the broken old-earth vernacular that seems to have clung to mechanics through the centuries. Past the torch blinding me I make out a weathered face peppered with old scars and fresh grease. “Are you a  _stowaway_? On me ship, a stow- oh never mind.” Rough hands reach for me and I am man-handled into the corridor, hatch hissing shut behind me as the torch finally lowers.  _Thank you_. “Picked a helluva time you did, outta think blokes like you got more sense or else more dumb luck, you’d not make it otherwise, but no, here you is right in the bleedin’ heart of it.” It takes a bit of effort to parse his meaning through the slang.

“Um, no not a stowaway sir, just searching for someone actually but that isn’t important” not until I know what has this man spooked. “What do you mean, the ‘heart of it,’ are you referring to the showers?” I ask hopefully. Vain hope, probably, but I choose to stick with optimism until the universe forces my hand.

“No you daft stow-rat, the ‘Rifters.” He looks at me expectantly.

“I’m sorry, is that supposed to have some sort of meaning?” The look on his face would be amusing in different circumstances, no doubt wondering who he wronged in a past life to be afflicted with the likes of me at a time like this (it is a look I earn with regularity). He shakes his head, motions me to follow with the lit torch, angling it off down the hall before us and sweeping it left and right along his path despite the fully operational nanolighting illuminating the corridor and I feel the hair on the back of my neck raising up in response to the subtle sense of  _wrong_ ness.

Several sections later and the endless stream of words has not ceased as the mechanic, Paul according to the patch on his smeared coveralls, picks his way through the halls. “Few days ago the ship passed through the Morpheus Cloud, fastest way through this part o’ the system.” His tone of voice made it clear the ship’s engineer didn’t approve of the shortcut, which wasn’t surprising. The Morpheus Cloud is a well-known dark spot in space thick with raw material and not much else, rarely traveled. Over the centuries the patch has earned something of a reputation, like Earth’s Bermuda triangle. Rumors spread of shuttles passing through the cloud and when the automated systems docked at the next port, the crew had simply vanished: an evolution of the classic ghost ship story, passed on to rile up greener members of a crew. The superstition surrounding it seemed to stick with some of the older spacers, which is how the tale had drawn me here; whispered by the sweepers on my own ship. “Went fine o’course, take more’in old ghost stories to bring down a fine piece o’work like this old girl. But the systems ain’t been doin’ right since.” He spares a worried glance for the walls of his ship amid the diligent assessment of their surroundings.

“What do you mean by not doing right?” I ask, keeping close to Paul’s side as he sets a healthy pace over the corrugated flooring. ‘ _Thank goodness I’m a person who wears boots_ ’ I think, adding another point to the list of my favorable attributes.

Paul jumps at every ping of machinery, gasp of filtration system, and groan of the ship as we travel towards what seems to be the engine room, judging by the steady increase in vibrations as we grow near. With the occasional pause to curse his flickering flashlight, he fills in the rest of the story: In the cloud, they had been running on the dark matter cores for the better part of a week ship-time when they broke through into the outskirts of the nebulae. Everything had been going to plan until the crew tried to switch the power back to the primary inductors. All indications pointed to them being fully operational, yet when they powered down the dark matter core the inductors hadn’t kicked on. The ship was reporting a lack of radiation, even though the ship is running straight for the arm of a spiral galaxy containing thousands of stars casting off just the kind of subatomic particles the inductors thrive on. The backup power banks had stored enough energy to run the support systems without so much as a hiccup, but they were adrift until one or the other of the propulsion systems could be brought back online. And apparently that was just the beginning.

Paul falls silent just as we reach what appears to be his destination. I smirk in triumph as I glimpse the door placard illuminated over his shoulder: engine room _, ‘point to me’_. As the old spacer leans forward to activate the control panel something shifts in the corridor beyond. I scan the area, but my vision doesn’t pick up anything at all. If I believed my eyes, I would say that the space was empty; but it wasn’t. The itching sensation between my shoulder blades that has been nagging me intensifies. We are being watched. Adrenaline pulses trough my veins, making my skin tingle as it turns up the sensitivity: fear as a super power, indeed.

“So, you mentioned something called ‘Rifters’?” I am slowly creeping forward, putting myself between Paul and the presence I can feel shifting against the alcove just ten paces away.

“Yea, right nasty buggers. Never seen ‘em before, mind, but the name seems to fit. We started noticing them on board soon as the dark drives stopped. Can’t see ‘im with the nanolighting though, s’why I got the hand torch. Hey!” He cries as I snatch said torch from his hand, shinning it into the empty-not-empty space and flinching back at the bone-splitting shriek the thing emits as soon as the light finds it. “Shit!” Paul’s scrabbling with the lock now as I try to keep the Rifter pinned, twitching the light left and right as it attempts to escape the beam’s focus. Suddenly my back is up against nothing but open air, and I step back blindly until Paul’s hand grabs me by the jacket again, yanking towards safety and throwing the deadlock home on the rapidly closing door. As soon as it shuts, a heavy mass slams against the metal with a thunderous roar.

Panting, I lean against the metal guide rails of the walkway and hand the flashlight back to Paul so he can sweep the room, searching for more of the creatures. As I catch my breath I reach to press my temples, trying to rub out the headache the piercing cry induced. “You alright, mate?” A heavy hand squeezes my shoulder in concern.

“Fine, I’m fine.” I tell him, pushing away from the railing and bouncing a bit on the balls of my feet to shake the rest of the feeling off. “Don’t know how you can stand that screaming though, gave me a headache in seconds.” Paul’s eyebrows pinch together is confusion.

“What screamin’?” Ah. Not audible to humans then. One more piece of data for the puzzle. Paul shrugs it off, apparently enough mystery on his plate already to not want to deal with the addition of me.

“Those things are all over the ship?” A nod, Paul bending down to open the panel below one of the massive room’s consoles, shifting through the exposed wires. “Any idea how many?”

“Nadda. We didn’t even notice ‘im till people started goin’ missing.” I raise an eyebrow at him questioningly, then prod him with another question when I realize he isn’t going to look up.

“Missing people?” He’s up to his elbows in wires now, and I wander over to investigate the monitors, scrolling through diagnostics and life signs indicators. The stasis pods are full, the ship transporting nearly 40,000 living things resting blissfully on and trusting the skeleton crew left awake to get them safely through the dark. As I search, I notice three red indicators blinking around the pods closest to the stern. Automated warnings, set to alert the crew of lost integrity with the stasis field. “Three of them are gone from their pods.” A grunt of affirmation. “Who else?”

***

_The Void_

Who am I? What am I? How? Where? So many questions. I am in space, between two systems where the sparse planets are harsh and mostly uninhabited. I ran as far away from life as I could manage. Without the human body I am nearly senseless. I have no eyes. I have no sense of sight or smell or touch. I can  **feel** things; the gravitational pull of each celestial body, the charged particles rushing past from every manner of astronomical reaction passing through the space I occupy, I can sense the movement of the universe everywhere and when at once.

But I do not feel as I did in that body, connected to the world and able to interact with it. Suddenly I am hungry to feel alive again, to be able to reach out and touch the world and even as the thought is forming, I am terrified. I am fearful of myself. I had reached out to learn without understanding the nature of myself and had destroyed them: four precious points of light that will never shine again in this universe. I extinguished them by accident. It takes me a moment to identify the feeling weighing down my soul:  **remorse**. Remorse for the death I have caused and fear of what will happen if I reach out again.

A foreign sense of panic seeps into me and I try to crush it. No, I can not run screaming off into the cosmos like a frightened child, I could end up causing even more harm.

Alone and spinning in the endless dark I begin to emulate my best point of reference for unknown situations; after all, the Doctor seems to thrive in them. I organize my thoughts into what he would call ‘the facts:’ I am thought. I can interact with the world around me. I can reach into a mind. I can occupy a body. Taking a body by force is wrong.

Alright, looking at the facts is not much better. I want to live and love and experience as the people in my memories have done. To do so, I need a physical form and I cannot coalesce my own. I **will not**  take one by force. That means I need someone to let me in. Or, more precisely, I need someone to let me be a part of them. Perhaps I am not something which should be on its own anyway; even the Doctor’s companions are there just as much to keep him in check as to share his life with him. If I find the right one, I can weave us together into a single consciousness. ‘I’ as I am will cease to be, so would they, but afterwards ‘we’ would walk a path all our own… and we wouldn’t be alone.

***

There hasn’t been a sound from the other side of the door in over an hour and the other hatches are just as eerily silent, but my skin pricks up near all but two of them now. “They’re surrounding us.” Paul glances at me and goes right back to work. He is trying to bypass the automated sensors keeping the dark matter drives offline in the presence of radiation. Like the hybrid petrol engines of old, the ship is built for fuel efficiency; the intelligent design meant to conserve the dark matter now keeping our engines dormant and leaving us sitting ducks. Giving him space to work, I continue my circuit of the room. Feeling out the pressure differences, the harmonics of the materials in the walls and floor, the crawling sensation up my spine when animal instinct tells me a predator is close by. Even if Paul gets the engines running, it’s not as if we can take this ship to port with an unknown threat aboard. The life signs have disappeared from two more pods in the short time that we’ve been trapped here. Our only chance is to figure out what the creatures are and what they want.

On the plus side, we aren’t alone. According to Paul the creatures went after the active crew first, only investigating the stasis pods when the crew got their wits about them and stopped being easy targets. There is a small group on the opposite aide of the ship, making slow progress towards the command deck at the bow, as well as a single green dot in the medbay. If we can get our work accomplished here and establish communications with the control room, we’ll at least have control of most of the ship. Another curse and a few sparks from Paul where he’s tangled in the ship’s guts and I go to see if I can help speed the process along.

“Alright old man, what are we up to and where do you need spare hands?” He looks up past the smoking connector he’s trying to splice with incredulity. “I was a mechanic, once upon a time.” I smile, trying for reassuring but probably just looking manic, which seems to be the default setting for this face. Apparently, manic is good enough because Paul shifts to make room for me to reach into the maw of cable banks and begins grumbling orders. I glance at the life signs indicator now and then as we work, following the group through the bowels of the ship. Every so often they abruptly stop and though I hope otherwise, I know that they are likely facing Rifters. They move in fits and starts and though we are working as fast as we can, I feel sick every time a dot disappears. Group slowly dwindling, they struggle on.

I curse and Paul nearly jumps out of his skin, looking around wildly and then leveling a solid glare in my direction. “Sorry old man.” I whisper, “They passed by the medbay. There’s someone alone in there.” He grunts again but I know that behind the rough edges he cares, otherwise he wouldn’t have been out here alone facing monsters to fix the ship.

***

_The Void_

Alone. I have been drifting aimlessly, stretched so thin that forming thoughts takes a monumental effort. I am looking for someone. I cast myself out as far as I can reach through space and time, calling, listening, I am searching. I am seeking something, but I no longer remember what it is. So, I drift, and I look. And am  _ **alone**_.

***

I come to on my back, still wrapped up in the cables with Paul motionless beside me and struggle up, pushing aside wires and smoking plastic to get a hold of him. He’s still breathing, the steady pounding of his heart audible from here and I check him over for anything more serious. His hands are singed, using them will be painful and fine-motor skills are probably out of the question for a while, but it doesn’t look like the power surge did any lasting damage. My own hands are blackened in places, one knuckle peeling back to reveal bone and I do my best to shut my mind to the pain receptors screaming for me to stop as I use my damaged hands to pull him away from the live wires.

The room is filled with the smell of barbeque and I try hard to ignore the fact that it is my flesh I smell cooking. Once I have Paul a safe distance from the buzzing cables, I take stock of the systems: still functional. The bypass seems to have worked, rerouting the positive radiation feed as soon as we closed the circuit and zapped ourselves, but I want Paul to screen the readout before we try to engage the engines. After a quick circuit of the room to check the seals on the doors, I return to his side and sink down to sit against the wall.

My hands are almost useless like this, so I take a few minutes to concentrate and knit the deep tissues back together. My skin crawls at the unfortunately familiar sensation of energy worming around beneath my skin to stich me back together. Once the muscles and tendons are operational again, I turn my attention back to Paul; the surface burns will heal fast enough on their own.

“Hey old man,” I call, grasping his shoulder and giving him a firm shake. When that does little more than rattle his head against the grating, I reach out to cover his mouth and pinch his nose shut. Ten seconds later panicked limbs are batting me away, Paul sitting up to gasp in a few deep breaths as he fits me with the meanest glare yet, until the pain in his hands registers and he goes straight to cussing. “She got us good, but I think it worked. C’mere” I grunt, getting my arms under his and pulling the larger man to his feet. The look he gives me makes it clear he doesn’t appreciate the manhandling, but he turns his attention to the screens, moving slow, the pain is obvious in every movement.

He sees the burns on my hands, skin still black and bubbling in places with the shiny pink of new flesh already peeking out between the cracks and I don’t miss the once over he gives me out of the corner of his eye, assessing. He’s sharp, this one, and I grin at him devil-may-care. I have made it a kind of game at this point: how long can I skate by before they realize I’m not one of them? It hurts less than ‘what happens when they find out what I am?’

***

_The Void_

I do not know how long I have been drifting here but I am stretched so thin I barely remember that I  _ **am**_. Holding on by threads of will, my sense of self is ever-thinning. I was looking for something. Am looking. Will be. I can’t remember what it is but when the faintest glimmer of thought reaches back out to answer mine, I feel it like a spider feels a tremor in its web.

With all the strength I have left I pull towards that point of interaction. Sensation screams through me as I coalesce, parts of me pulled from lightyears and eons away. The celestial motion is complicated here; one large body casting off enormous amounts of energy holding several masses in gravitational orbit, many with small orbiting bodies of their own, all weaving an intricate dance of gravitational pull and magnetic influence constantly in flux. And underneath it all, a faint beacon calling to me from one of the spinning rocks.

There is life here, the world is teeming with it and I understand it to be a planet. Once I am close enough to be caught in the planet’s gravity, I allow myself to fall through the shifting layers of its atmosphere, through gaseous bodies rushing wildly back and forth across the surface, all the way down to the crust. The surface is covered by every kind of creature and the fear in me has never been this strong, but I push forward. I waited endlessly for this one moment, I do not know that another will occur.

The phase of matter around me changes, thin and gaseous above, hard and solid below, around me the mercurial sensation of liquid matter. The shifting press of molecules is almost comforting, and I allow myself to mimic the currents flowing through it, spreading my awareness to the surface of the pool, pressing it smooth.

On the shore before me is the spark which led me here, and even senseless I feel it glowing with restrained energy. A ghost of sensation washes over my mind, one psychic touch and then the entity is simply gone.

***

The deep rush of the dark matter drives spooling up is enough to get even Paul smiling, though the corners of his eyes are deeply lined with pain. I grin back, spinning around to recheck the life signs monitor when I hear the tell-tale his of an air-pressure change as a door slides silently open behind us. The power system reboots when the source switches back to the engines; could it have overridden the locks?! I whip around in time to see Paul fumbling with the flashlight, blood from the burns he’s opening making his fingers too slick to get at the control switch. I feel them circling now, rushing around to exploit the open doorway but my primary concern is Paul, standing between me and the open door. A door that had my hair rising on the back of my neck. In two strides I have the flashlight out of his hands and trained on the Rifter, thumb poised over the switch and I push Paul behind me as I edge backwards towards the opposite wall.

“Alright now, I know this light burns you. I know it hurts something awful, and I don’t want to do that if I can help it. And you don’t want to hurt us either, do you?” I recall the long rows of teeth in the multiple mouths circling the creature’s body, the barbed tentacles that had thrashed out all around it as the small beam rendered it visible, and I don’t believe my own words. We are drawing abeam the casings of the dark matter engines when I feel it shift to the side, making room for another Rifter coming through the door, trying to flank us. A third pushes its way in and one flashlight’s not going to cut it if we want to get out alive.

There is an engine on either side of us now, below the narrow walkway; two thick cylinders laying sideways. The guide rails are providing us some protection, but only so long as they don’t get behind us. On the downside, the deep rumble of the engines dampens my perception of the Rifters; I can’t track their movements with any precision. Heart hammering, I turn to rush Paul along when a gleam catches my eye. A tiny crack in the photon shielding surrounding the dark matter drive. “Paul what kind of light is this?” I whisper breathlessly, hoping I know the answer as I wave to indicate the torch.

“It’s a uh, LED I think? Oldest one I’ve got.” The grin splitting my face is so wide it hurts. “Paul, run for the door. Get it open for me and don’t look back.”

“What the hell are you” he breaks off as I bolt away from him, sprinting straight past the closest Rifter, so near I can feel the disturbance of its erratic movements through the air. I hear Paul curse and break into a run behind me as I vault over the railing, landing hard on the case of one of the newly-roaring dark matter drives. Wheezing, I slide off the side and run over to the control panel, popping the lid and booting up the control system. I can feel the Rifters growing near, circling their prey. As the cold brush of a tentacle passes just over my shoulder the command line blinks green and as soon as I acknowledge it the seal on the photon shielding pops open with a hiss.

One screaming Rictor was a headache; the cacophony bearing down on me now is debilitating. I stumble towards the hatch, praying Paul got it open in time and that the automatic safety hasn’t trapped me inside. Eyes shut tight, I stumble up the stairs to the upper deck, pulling myself laboriously to the door. I feel the fabric of my jacket starting to smoke under the onslaught of the harmful radiation. Crawling now, I make it to the door, digging my fingers into the grating and pulling myself forward, one painful foot at a time, my blood feels like fire running through my veins by the time I finally clear the threshold. The abrupt silence after it slides shut is startling; the screaming voices trapped on the other side.

“You are out of your bleeding ‘ead.” Paul informs me, leaning over into my line of sight as I try to catch my breath and I laugh, and so does the old man, tears stinging in our eyes as he helps me to my feet, my hands griping his forearms to avoid further damage to his hands. “Come on then, the control room is this way,” Paul gestures, motioning me to follow.

“Yes” I pant, leaning heavily on the smooth walls as I turn to face the opposite direction. “But the infirmary is this way. Just a shortcut. Won’t take a minute.” I grunt, pushing myself forward. “There was someone alive. Last time I looked at the monitors. Might still be there.” Paul grumbles, of course, but he turns to follow me anyway.

***

_The Void_

Floating in this lake is not dissimilar to the drifting I had done before, but at least I am fully condensed here. I reached out after the glowing thing left me but there is no trace of it, not within the local galaxy at least. While I cannot explain the reason, there is a nagging familiarity urging me to trust that the beacon brought me here for a purpose. It is faith; an odd phenomenon without a base in reliable fact. It frustrates and gives me hope in equal measure.

This place is mildly isolated, not near the dense thickets of life crisscrossing above and below the landmass. There is a small metal box on the shore, with a human inside it, their mind a constant hum in the background, and I gently brush the thoughts ghosting along the surface as they busy themselves. The heat of the planet’s star passes from one side of me to the other, slowly creeping to the horizon and then the charged particles are gone, blocked by the planet’s sturdy mass. As it fades, the human slows almost to stagnation. The surface of their mind is blank when I brush past it, but I am struck by an echo of loss; something has been taken from them and the hole it left behind is crippling.

As soon as I retract the gentle probing contact, they seem to come to life again, moving animatedly out of the metal box and out along the low dock skimming the surface of the water. I still completely as they come to the edge and look down upon me, as though they felt my presence. As though they can  _ **see**_ me. This human stands alone, staring into the abyss, and when the abyss stares back it sits calmly by the edge, and listens. I reach out again and when I contact it, the mind is suddenly open; perhaps it sensed the emptiness within me, reaching out for something to latch onto. Perhaps it understood, even if just a little. In the quiet hush of mind-scape I explore and share in equal measure, our edges slowly blurring as we learn, and while they stop sometimes to linger on a certain place or time I am met without rejection.

Hours minutes or millennia pass us by as we drift together, laid bare. In the end, there is only the question, wordless but understood. There is only the answer, ‘yes’ and touch of fingers to the surface of a pool.

***

The infirmary is abandoned, the three-man crew normally staffing the unit during transit is no-where to be found. I rifle through the drawers and cabinets looking for anything useful as Paul hunts for our life sign. “Over here” Paul calls from behind of the privacy curtains, and I move to join him, helping him don one of the small headlamps the medics keep for emergencies. The bed is occupied by a small girl, skin so pale as to be almost translucent against the sheets. The medical chart cites a bad reaction to the stasis chamber, a rare form of modern claustrophobia that causes the brain to panic, even after the body is frozen. They have her in an induced coma, most likely intending to place her back within the pod before the Rictus’ came.

“Here,” I hand the chart off to Paul and go to the monitors, scrolling through pages of medications, bringing up the IV-drip configuration page, dialing down the supply of melatonin and dopamine constantly feeding into her system and sending along a jolt of adrenaline instead.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” The old man is hovering by the girl’s side, fidgeting with the clipboard. I smile at him again, and he glares to let me know it doesn’t help. “Look, she seems safe ‘nuff here, we could just leave her.” I glance up to make a smart remark, but it looks like the words left a bad taste in his mouth, regret settling in even as he said them.

“Sure,” I say, saving the changes and going to the girl’s side. My eyes follow the new medication through the clear tubes until it disappears into her arm and then I pull the needles free before she can wake up to feel it. “But can we guarantee those things won’t eventually come for her? People have been disappearing from stasis, they cleared out most of the active crew, now they’re after the easy targets.” We wait in silence, occasionally glancing at the door while pretending not to, the walls creeping closer as the seconds tick by. I feel him watching me from across the small bed and when he breaks the silence, I am almost ready for it.

“What _are_ y,” he gets cut off by a sharp intake of breath, large eyes searching wildly around the room, and I take one of her small hands into mine. I am careful, resting the other hand lightly on her shoulder, waiting for her to register my presence through the haze of medicated sleep.

“Hey there, it’s alright” I help her to sit up. “You’re in the medical bay. You had a bad reaction to the stasis chamber and had to be medicated; you’re going to be drowsy and disoriented for a little while.” She blinks repeatedly against the lights in the ceiling and grips my hand, strong despite how fragile it feels in mine. “What’s your name?” She blinks some more, trying to clear her head.

“Margarette” she croaks, voice rough with disuse from her three-day cat nap.

“Margarette,” I try a for a reassuring smile, “do not be alarmed, but there is something wrong with the ship. Paul and I are on our way up to the control room to get it sorted, and I think it’s probably best if you come with us.” She’s frowning now.

“What do you mean something’s wrong? Who are you? Where are…” she trails off, looking around the empty medical bay, clearly out of sorts.

“The engines disengaged but we’ve got them back online, and ever since it left the Morpheus Cloud creatures have been aboard the ship. This is Paul, ship’s engineer extraordinaire,” he turns away with an embarrassed huff, “and I’m just passing through. I was looking for a traveler, thought he might be on board but keeping us all afloat took precedence.” Though if I’m being honest, there’s a pretty high likelihood that he’s on board, probably with the group in the control room.

“Sugar coat it why don’cha?” the old man mutters, but my smile doesn’t falter.

“Why bother?” turning back to Margarette: “I would like for all of us to survive this and being informed is the only way to manage it.” The creeping sensation along my spine is intensifying, my senses picking up the Rifters’ proximity again now that the engines are far away, and my skin is recovering from the radiation burns. “We have to go.” I place one of the headlamps in her hand and pull the sheets away, making both of them jump. “Can you walk?”

She blinks at me owlishly, and after a heartbeat her hand closes around the headlamp, pulling it over her head and using it to push the fair hair out of her face. Barefoot, she swings her legs over the side of the bed and hops down. “It doesn’t seem that I have much choice in the matter.” She sways for a moment, latching onto my hand when I reach out to steady her.

“Easy,” she gets her bearings and touches the headlamp.

“Right, explain the headlamps, has the lighting been affected throughout the ship?” Oh, this girl is brilliant, made of stern stuff inside that fragile body.

“The creatures can’t be seen with nanolighting. It passes right through them, rendering them invisible. At a guess, they are slightly out of phase from the rest of the dimension, but the LED’s output is photonic, it can touch them. Also appears to be extremely painful; keeping them in a direct beam will force them to keep their distance.” She nods, still holding tight to my hand, apparently oblivious to the dead skin flaking away from them. The old man is already heading for the door.

“Not far now,” Paul tells us once we’re out in the ‘open’ hall. Terrible to feel so exposed in such a small space. I am taking point, my headlamp striking forward into our intended path, Paul sweeping his own beam along in our wake to guard against ankle-biters. By silent agreement we keep Margarette between us, shining her light to-and-fro into the nooks and crannies our beams are missing. Not the fastest six-legged race I’ve ever been a part of, but we manage a reasonable pace. We make it almost ten minutes without incident and I begin to hope the engine room was the worst of it, which of course means the very next turn drives us right into the heart of trouble. Two airlocks out from the control room a Rifter stands blocking our only path forward.

Just as I recognize the threat, Margarette’s head snaps towards it and the resulting cry feels like it’s splitting my skull. She squeezes my hand tight and I focus on it, yelling over the cacophony that only I can hear, “RUN!” I pull her forward by the arm and when she stumbles, I lift her into my arms. “Keep looking at it Margarette, don’t let it out of your sight!” and we run.

The corridor seems to go on forever as I sprint away from the mind-numbing frequency. Paul is close on our heels, his footfalls heavy on the metal flooring. At the edges of my hearing there’s faint static, like the crackle of a faulty comm line. I run into the doorway at a full tilt, slamming my forearm into the metal to stop my momentum and guard Margarette from the impact before I drop her to her feet.

When I turn, Paul is screaming just within arm’s reach: he has his headlamp trained on the Rifter to my right, protecting Margarette and myself. The closest Rifter on his other side has a tentacle around his forearm, and I focus the full intensity of my lamp there until it releases him, yanking him back to stand next to me, the three of us pressed tight against the metal frame. Three beams flash out into the brightly lit hallway, each illuminating a small slice of hellish teeth and tentacle and promised violence.

***

Being born is less frightening the second time. It helps knowing the answers to some of the bigger questions. Where? Earth, a place called America. When? 21st century. Why? Well, this is what we were searching for; something to be and to do and to share. What? Less definitive, but I know half of what made me was human. Better start than last time. Who? Blank slate, something to be filled in as we go. I smile at the distorted reflection on the surface of the water. Settling into my body, I push off against the soft loam beneath my feet and break the surface, push-pull-clawing my way up and out through the plants skirting the shoreline and marveling at the sensation of being wet and cold and shivering in the night air.

I startle as a sound bubbles up around me before I recognize it as my own laughter. Grinning fit to burst I try to catalog the newness all around me: bug wings beating through the air, the groaning of the trees around me as they grow, the gentle turning of the earth beneath my feet. There are stars out there in the sky so infinitely far and I can feel the gentle pinprick of their fire on my skin. The metal box behind me is my old home, a small RV spilling warm light out across the water’s surface. The soft strains of the radio reach out and I hum, closing my eyes.  _I love music_ , I decide. Not bad as far as first impressions go.

***

The door opens in a rush and we fall together over the threshold, stumbling in a tangle of limbs, Margarette’s small form still tucked safely between us. The last glimpse I have is of their gaping maws, the tentacles retreating just before the doors slide shut and block them from us. My ears are ringing, and I push myself to my feet, pull the other two up along with me, and collapse back against the door, panting. Two tiny hands on my face, tilting it until our eyes meet, her small green orbs full of worry. “It’s alright,” I rasp, “I just need a moment,” and I have to gasp for breath again.

A familiar scarred hand lands on her shoulder, pulling her gently away. “It’s alright girl, he can ‘ear ‘em is all. Light makes ‘em scream or some such. You just give ‘im a mo’.” The next voice that splits the silence around us stops my heart for a moment, breath stuttering now for an entirely different reason.

“Well hello. Made it here right in time, you lot did. I take it we ought to thank you for fixing the engines?” My vision is still blurry, but I recognize the stance of the shadow dancing before me. Tall, lean and aloof, hands in his pockets, the Doctor stands looking down at me. “Can hear them, you say?” he asks Paul, the mechanic nodding. He turns to me again, considering. “Well isn’t  _that_  interesting.”

***

Sometimes it’s harder to stay away than others, as I linger on the earth out of necessity. In my dreams I see them all so often, the Doctor and his bright companions shinning like beacons against my self-inflicted solitude. I want to meet them, to greet the faces that I know so well, but I am aware of what my interference can cause throughout their timeline. So I wait, and I watch, and I learn all that I can, and plan for what I hope will be a brilliant future. I stay well away from Cardiff, from Torchwood, from the entirety of England, anywhere and when I know them to be traveling.

I will find them when the time is right.

***

The running was easy. Being trapped here in the control room is nerve wracking by comparison. The Doctor paces from one monitor to the next, touching screens and waving the sonic about like a magic wand. Through our combined information, he was able to identify the species running amuck on the ship. Paul’s ‘Rifters’ are actually a variation of the paradox wraiths, unnervingly common in the universe (there is a reason we are afraid of the dark; when we feel watched our first instinct is to reach for the light switch, protecting us from a threat we later convince ourselves was never real). The missing crew have likely been consumed, dragged off into the parallel dimension the wraiths co-occupy. Their presence in such numbers explains the failure of the inductors as well: so many in one place and time has pulled us into a ‘dual citizenship’ similar to that of the creatures, taking the inductors out of phase with the ambient radiation of the nebula.

Protecting the ship is simple when all is said and done. If we can flood the craft with incompatible photons it will drive them back into their native dimension, and we already have a photonic generator on board in the form of the dark matter engines. All we have to do is re-direct the charged ions from the photonic shields to the primary filtration system, and the particles will circulate throughout the ship’s air supply; toxic to the void wraiths and harmless to the humanoids still aboard.

Naturally, the Doctor and I end up running through the halls, headlamps strapped to every limb, emergency tube lighting the other survivors scrounged up wrapped about our bodies like a Christmas light job gone wrong. We look like we are on our way to a futuristic rave as we sprint for our lives to reach the engine room, the creatures shrieking and snapping at our heels.

At the door I toss the Doctor behind me, shouldering it open and sprinting blind down the stairs I crawled up earlier. I fall the last three as my knees cripple, the pain of my skin peeling fighting for attention as I stumble to my feet, fumble for the shield control. He bursts in after me as soon as the shields are reasserted.

The Doctor loses no time in assaulting the control console with the sonic, stepping over the bypass Paul and I had rigged. Fortunately, there is no near-fatal surge of electricity to knock us out this time. Unfortunately, I am out of energy reserves. As my vision fogs, swimming in and out with the pulses of pain chasing the toxic energy coursing through me, I see him standing over the console, triumphant. The Doctor saved them, as he always does.

***

Living close in hand with members of a species not entirely your own is disconcerting. Particularly when you are the only odd man truly out of the bunch. The stares I receive are frequent, the confused silence of a human lost for words the constant closing line to almost all of my conversations, and the fact that I am discovering just as much about myself as they are really doesn’t help the situation.

But overall, life on earth seems lovely, if a bit small. It takes a while, years and years of toiling away to build on what my ‘parent’ had already set in place for me, but eventually I garner the wealth I need to thrive here and take advantage of every line of study I can manage. By the time human beings step into their ‘final frontier’ with confidence, I am stepping with them; the shadow following them to the stars.

It feels like going home.

***

The walk back to the control room is slow, my body limping along laboriously as I try to heal the second bought of radiation poisoning I had received in so many hours. I am running on empty by the time we reach the airlock into the control room once again. The Doctor has been helping me, supporting me with a firm hand under my elbow and shooting hard looks from the corner of his eye as he tries to figure me out. He isn’t stupid, this man; far from it. I know he has a computation running on me, each detail he has garnered added to a growing list of questions. I raise them in the most normal of circumstances, I can only imagine how much of a glaring enigma I am to a mind such as his.

“And who are you, then?” he finally asks as the door slides shut behind us, the Doctor catching his breath. Smart of him to wait until we were back with witnesses, though I can’t say he was being subtle along the way. When the Doctor wants to ask a question, you can feel his attention on you like a physical pressure.

“That’s a good question. I’m still trying to figure it out.” The Doctor’s recall is remarkable, especially considering the sheer amount of information he has to sift through stored within that ancient mind. I can see the moment he recognizes his own words, mind turning over with machine-like focus as he uses this single data point to extrapolate the possibilities of who I am, how he almost knows me.

“You’ve met me.” He states it as a fact, but he could just as easily be wrong and knows it. Either way, my answer adds another data point to narrow his parameters. So little to go on; a few disjointed references, the nagging whisper of familiarity gnawing at his gut and suddenly it strikes me that he knows, will know, will almost certainly place me before long. Remarkable man. “Just the once” I admit,  _and in a very different form_ , I think.

The length of one double-time heartbeat passes, and it feels like an eternity as I watch the puzzle pieces clicking into place, his nostrils flashing, registering the faint echo of that long-forgotten smell he only glimpsed the once. The final piece slots firmly into place and in a flurry of movement, the Doctor has his feet planted firmly, the sonic appearing in his hand as if by magic and trained between my eyes. I don’t miss the way he puts himself between me and the other occupants of the shuttle port as the sonic’s frequency begins to resonate my skull. The Doctor’s eyes are full of cold fury where they meet mine, past the faint blue light.

“Get out of them,” he snarls.

***

If there is one thing I know about the Doctor, it is his capacity for guilt. He wears it like a mantle and everyone he meets seems to add a single stitch: their combined weight enough to crush a man but he just goes on, collecting more.

A tragedy he cannot avert in time, a monster whom he could not stop, a puzzle he solved a moment too late, and no matter how many lives he saves the Doctor remembers the dead, picks up another stone, carries more weight. Four of the stones he bears are meant for me, and I cannot bear to know that I have added to his burden. And so I search for him. I hunt the Doctor through the void to take back what he stole: my share of the weight.

***

“Get out of them.” He repeats, annunciating each word.

“I’m afraid that’s not possible.” He looks at me as though I am something vile, as though he is repulsed. One moment passes into the next and he sags under the weight of another loss, one more death the Doctor automatically takes upon himself. “I’m not dead” I spit, offended though I have no right to be, he couldn’t know. “Far from, and I didn’t come here to harm anyone, I’m only here for you.” I realize my poor choice of words only after they are out in the open, unchangeable.

“Sorry to disappoint but you won’t be taking me.” The sonic is back with a vengeance, the Doctor’s eyes darting through the exits I know he catalogued as soon as we set foot here. The humanoids clustered behind him are glancing back and forth between us, trying to piece together the bits of our conversation that make any sort of sense, weighing them against the preceding events.

As far as they’re concerned, I was just as instrumental in their survival as the Doctor. But the fear and adrenaline are still coursing through them, heightening the fight-or-flight instincts primed and ready to identify another threat, eliminate it, and  _run_. I am suddenly transported to another metal box, surrounded by an environment so different than this vacuum, but no less deadly. The faces peering over the Doctor’s shoulder have changed, but the expressions are identical. Fear. Ignorance becoming violent. Despair. Confusion. Loss. Right now, they are sheep, ready to latch onto the first suggestion and I am once more standing on the precipice at the mercy of a mob. This time I doubt the Doctor’s arguments will sway them in my favor.

I keep my hands lowered to my sides, refusing to look like the enemy he is making me out to be. “I came here to speak with you, nothing more.”

“Get on with it then.”

“It is a conversation I would rather have without terrifying the surviving crew” I bite out, one hand coming up to press my temples, trying to stave off the headache threatening my concentration.

“With respect, doctor, they haven’t done a thing out of place, but to be here unexpected, an’ as we see it, you’ve done the same.” Paul is standing just over the Doctor’s shoulder, hesitating to reach out but ready to intervene if necessary.

“He got me through the airlock,” Margarete states firmly, even paler now than she had been laying against the sheets. “If he hadn’t woken me up, I would still be alone in the infirmary with those things.”

The Doctor could have been carved from stone, a weeping angel caught by all these mortal eyes, the very act of their witness keeping me safe from his wrath. For now. I wish I had the time to appreciate the irony of how our roles have shifted this time around, perception warping our realities. Still looking at him through my fingers, I address them. “A long time ago, when we first met, people got hurt and it  _was_  my fault. This man has every reason not to trust me.”

“All the same Doctor, they mean no harm here. That’s clear ‘nuff. Why don’t you put that thing down, you’re hurtn’ ‘im.” The Doctor flinches away from the hand reaching to gently lower his outstretched arm. He looks wild; an animal backed into a corner and ready to bite.

“The sonic’s not harmful. It just gives a bit of a headache to people who can hear it.”

“The sonic isn’t  _audible_ , it” I cut him off.

“I can feel it vibrating the individual atoms of my skull.”  _Snap_ , his jaw shuts.  _Click_ , the whirring shuts off. I run my hand along my face, deep breath, blinking away the slight blur from my vision.

“Humans aren’t meant to be able to feel that” he tosses out to me, a not-very-hidden question.

“Humans can’t” I confirm, and he flinches minutely. He stows the sonic and buries his hands in his coat pockets. He’s still looking at me as though I’m walking around in someone else’s corpse.

“To talk. Right. After you then.” He frees an arm to gesture to the open decompression chamber in the empty airlock, where the escape pod was docked before the original navigation crew abandoned ship, not meeting my eyes. I quirk an eyebrow, clearly not missing the blatant possibility of being jettisoned.

“Not very subtle, Doc” I toss over my shoulder, already striding past the automatic shutters, turning to face him only when my back is up against the far door; three feet of solid metal feels like tissue paper when it’s the only thing standing between you and the vacuum of space.

Seconds pass like hours as I wait for the Doctor to move towards the lock and past the panel that could eject me in an instant. I read the thoughts scrolling across his face, desire to avenge, just this once not to have to be the Doctor, to  _make_   _it right_. It blows over and, once more safely in the eye of the storm, the Doctor joins me.

The other passengers are a hushed ball of potential energy at the outskirts; they don’t agree, don’t fully understand, but they don’t intervene.

Margarete’s shoulders relax, but she is holding Paul’s injured hand, white-knuckled. I wink at her over the Doctor’s shoulder right before he palms the sonic, sealing the inner doors behind him and enclosing us in a thick silence.

“What are you, and how did you get off Midnight? Is that where you killed this one?” I had prepared myself for his hostility, but that didn’t remove the sting from it. Was it always going to be like this? Would it always be this painful when I meet someone I know almost better than I know myself, as well as the Doctor knows them; whom I can’t help but to love? Will it be better for them to know and hate me as the Doctor does, or to never have known me at all?

“I’m human, 20th century earth, place called America, and I’m…” despite the number of times I had run through this, it wasn’t easy to describe in words something only understood in my own mind. “A consciousness, formed out of the void by creation expanding across the universe.”

The way his face scrunches up at a puzzle is fascinating. “What?” He passes the diagnostic over me again and I flinch as tremors chase its path along my bones. “Sorry” he mutters insincerely, distracted by the sonic’s output, apparently just as perplexed by what he finds there. “That doesn’t make sense.” He manages to sound like a child, accusing the world of not playing fair. I can’t help the smile creeping onto my face. “The void’s not… a  _thing_ , that’s the whole point of it.” He tosses at me accusingly.

 “What is the void without existence?” I counter. “It just isn’t. You define it by its opposite. Darkness is the absence of light. Cold the absence of heat, without their counterpoint they simply… aren’t.”

“So you’re what, exactly. The absence of life?”

I refuse to raise to his baiting. “More like a byproduct of it, I think. As creation expanded through this dimension, the void was compressed…”

“The universe is infinite, how did it  _compress_  any…” he cuts himself off as suddenly as he had me, and I wait for his mind to turn over. His mouth, which had stayed open on a silent “o,” suddenly splits into a manic grin and I have time to wonder how anyone is expected to keep up with the speed of his changing personality, and then he’s off. “Greater and smaller infinities, oh of course! Oh, that’s good. So, along barrels all of creation, and as it spreads, the empty space between becomes defined.” He pauses, looking at me expectantly, making an impatient gesture of ‘come on then’ at my silence. Apparently, the Doctor needs an active listener for his monologues.

“Yes,” I nod, which seems to be enough.

“So somewhere along the line, probably in one of the denser pockets of the cosmos, this nothingness becomes compressed in upon itself enough to…” he trails off again, and I should have known I wouldn’t have to explain much to this man once I’d gotten him started, and my heart constricts at the strange familiarity of knowing someone through borrowed memories. All at once, the excitement is gone from him as though it had never been, like he hit a mental wall. “It became sentient.”

As I look on, the Doctor’s face appears to transform yet again, lines marking the corners of his eyes, creasing his forehead, and suddenly he is wearing the full force of his thousand years.

“You came into being with nothing, no idea what had happened or what you were or how you had come to be. Existence entirely from scratch. Something new. On Midnight, that was you, brand new, stumbling through the world like a baby. A powerful one. Alone. The bus was different from what you had found until then, you were curious.” He begins to pace the short width of the airlock. I press my shoulders into the door behind me, arms tight across my chest, feeling small. “You didn’t know what you were doing. You didn’t understand what it meant that they were alive. You didn’t know that you were killing them.”

“No.” My voice is rocks and gravel, body locked up tight and pressing hard against the cold metal digging into my shoulder blades to ground myself. The stars were beautiful beyond the thick exoglass beneath my feet, so much easier to look at than his eyes.

“I tried. If I had only  _known_ , so stupid” the storm’s fury is turning inward now, the Doctor quick to blame himself as always.

“No.” This time the word ricochets through the small room like a bullet; every bit as forceful. “This is you being stupid, Doctor. How could you have known? You had ten minutes in a metal box with a terrified mob and a monster that didn’t even know what it was”

“I should have saved her.” He sounds broken.

“I would have killed you along with everyone else aboard that bus.” He’s stopped moving now, rooted to the spot and staring at his own reflection just as I had done. I wonder what he sees in himself in moments like these.

“Her name was Sarah” He flinches. “Sky, Joe, Claude, Sarah. I killed them.”

“You didn’t even know they were alive.”

“I killed them.” He opens his mouth to object again and I cut him off. “Doctor, look at me.” His face is a rictus of frustration and fury, wanting something to blame and, finding me an unworthy target, he folds it back onto himself. They say that eyes are the windows to the soul; what I see beyond these tearing panes is broken almost beyond repair.

“I killed them” I repeat until the fury melts away, a resigned misery washing over him instead. He sounds so tired when he asks, “what do you want from me?” for the second time.

“Nothing. You’ve given me more than I could ever ask for. So did Sky. Through her I perceived the world for the first time. I had senses. I had language. A way to organize what I then recognized as thoughts. From you” a deep breath to steady myself before I continued. I do not think the doctor is aware of just how much I saw within him. “Your mind is almost infinite. The experiences I took from you gave me a frame of reference. Thoughts and feeling and lessons wrapped up in a million tiny moments, a sea of faces spanning across space and time.” A sharp intake of breath is the only indication that the Doctor realizes the magnitude of what I am implying; then the silence between us stretches, growing thick.

“Nothing will ever change what I have done Doctor. There is no form of apology or confession that can change the past.” He’s staring at me now, the weight of his gaze bearing down on me and I force myself to meet his eyes, to face the pain and the betrayal plain within them.

“What do you want from me” he asks again, deflated.

“Nothing, Doctor. You have enough guilt, enough blame placed on your shoulders.” I hold his eyes. “Sky, Joe, Claude, Sarah. You did not fail them doctor. It was not your fault. It was mine. That day I learned of life, and of death, and both lessons came too late.”

The silence stretches on until my skin begins to crawl with the effort of remaining still, waiting for the questions I know are yet to come. Just as I am about to break it with a question of my own, the doctor shakes a hand loose from his coat.

“How did you become” he sweeps it to indicate all of me, at a loss for words.

“When I left Midnight, I was formless. I drifted, assimilating, evolving alone. I could not give myself form, and without a body I was unable to safely interact with the world the way I had learned to, the way that you did. But I couldn’t take a body by force, not again.” He flinches, “So, I cast myself out through space and time as far as I could reach and waited, until I found someone.”

“What, a donor?” he sounds disgusted. “Someone volunteered to die and that makes it all right?”

“No,” my voice is firm, brooking no argument. “I didn’t destroy anything. I joined it. Two sentients looked inside each-other and accepted everything they saw, everything they’d ever done and thought and been. I was a girl from 20th century earth. I was 29 years old. I was void, older than the universe. I am whatever they became, two hundred years and a day ago on a planet long since dead.”

The Doctor still looks wrung out, but this is enough to get a spark of interest back into his eyes, at least. “How do you keep from tearing yourself apart?”

“It is a close thing, some days. But most of the time my memories from before are more like dreams, only half-remembered. Only the things I’ve experienced since seem real.”

The Doctor shifts, and I am aware of how solid his presence is, where he has planted himself between me and the shutter, and suddenly I understand what had prompted him to relent to this conversation in the first place. He is deciding whether I am a threat, prepared to launch me to the void if he finds anything amiss. As if sensing my comprehension, he voices his real fear; “What’s to keep you from jumping into someone else?”

“I AM this,” gesturing to my body. “What we were has ceased to be and cannot ever be again; I cannot be  _undone_. If my body dies, then so will I. Or perhaps my consciousness will remain, and I will drift again, without form, until by some grace I find another soul who can see into mine, everything I have done, everything I ever was and ever could be, and accept it, all of it. And I would have to do the same. I’d likely never find another. Or perhaps I’d become a new form existence. That’s the thing about being unique; I’ll never know anything about myself until it happens.”

I reach out to place my hand on the glass wall to reassure myself of my physical presence; the wall vibrates with the systems powering the ship, the turn of its artificial gravity fights against the larger gravitational pull of the nearby star, microscopic imperfections pit the surface of the glass beneath my fingertips. “It’s terrifying.”

The sonics’s spinning nervously in his hand, eyes shifting from the tool to me, to the control panel and back again telegraphing his indecision. I swallow down the worry starting to worm its way up my spine; the fear you feel when you are standing upon a cliff and contemplating jumping off.

That door won’t open until the doctor knows with certainty that I am what I claim. As far as I can think, there’s only one way to accomplish that and be  _sure_. The doctor is a mind reader, after all. He could read me like a book. All I have to do is let him. Right. “You don’t have to take my word for it.” I step towards him and he steps back, I repeat the gesture and so does he and in an awkward dance I back him into the corner. I stop within arm’s reach and before he can panic, I lean my head towards him in silent invitation.

“Oh right, because that turned out so well last time.”

“I won’t reach back. I won’t block you out of anything. Open book.” It’s only fair, in a way, to allow him the same opportunity I once took by force. My heart is pounding, and he must be able to hear it over the quiet ventilation. On the surface it is a simple solution, but the magnitude of what I am offering him is not lost on me.

If I let the doctor in of my own volition, no walls, no barriers, no interference, I cannot protect myself from him if he chooses to harm me. So many things can be done to a mind; a memory altered here, erased there, opinions planted like an inoperable cancer changing the very core that makes you who you are. I stand firm and harden my resolve against the whisper of fear telling me to run. Overriding the survival instincts telling me not to jump, I lean sideways to address the comms panel by the hatch. “Margarette?”

“I’m here” the panel crackles after a moment. The Doctor jumps, twisting around to spy the crew, clustered close around the control console, still nervous and afraid but oh so strong. Margarette’s small hand is steady where it rests upon the relay. “What are you going to do?” She asks, worried.

The Doctor’s mouth is slightly agape, and I can’t help a small chuckle. “What did you expect, for them not to listen?” He scoffs, muttering about apes and propriety and I look over his shoulder and speak directly to Margarette. “The Doctor here met me once before, like I said, and on that day, I killed some people. He’s in here with me because he believes in giving people a chance, but he won’t let me out unless he knows I’m not a threat to you.” One last deep breath before my feet leave the edge “Fortunately, the Doctor can read my mind, and if he signals you in any way or anything at all seems to go amiss you, Margarette, are going to activate that airlock.” Her face is the palest that I’ve seen it yet.

“But you’re not… you saved me, isn’t that enough?”

“No, love, it isn’t. Truth be told, I’m not sure what’s lurking in the darker corners up here.” I tap my temple. “One signal and I’m out that door, drifting in space where I can’t hurt you. Do you understand?” A small nod, a deep breath and suddenly this little waif of a girl summons up a core of steel, determined as a battle-hardened queen. She’s extraordinary. I’ll have to tell her so, when this is done with. “Good girl.”

The Doctor’s looking at me like I’m mad. I can’t help but agree with his assessment as I step forward one last time into open air with nothing left to catch me. “You know what I can do to you, if you’re not careful. I can erase your memories, plant thoughts, change the fabric of you. I could want revenge and you’re giving me the opportunity.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Then why would you…”

“Trust.” My eyes are closed, head already bowed towards him, the physical proof of my words. “I trust you, that’s why.” I take a deep breath and tell myself what so many others have said to themselves while they are falling: believe in the doctor, and it will be alright.

His fingertips are cool where they rest gently on my temples, and as he contacts both sides, I feel a jolt, like an electric current running between his hands. I focus on the cold sensation of his touch, and let my mind go blank as I am plunged beneath the surface.

***

The sensation is foreign but not unpleasant, floating weightless while cool water trickles through my mind, seeping into every crevice. Shadows drift by, interspersed with flashes of color, bites of sound, but he doesn’t linger long enough for anything to solidify.

Time is meaningless in this place, I don’t know how long I drift while he searches, or what he expects to find. I doubt if he knows himself, until a faint golden hue begins to insert itself into the vortex of thought swirling around me. I can feel him focus on it, the mental equivalent of tugging on a thread. Moments flicker by along the string; floating in nothingness, the sharpness of the planet Midnight, the green of planet earth, a ship drifting through the wrong side of a nebulae, all so distant from one another, yet connected by the same diffuse glow of gold around the edges of perception.

Another pull of focus and a memory coalesces like a waking dream. Sunlight on the water. Breeze rustling through the trees. Insects buzzing just beyond a screen door, a woman cooking on the other side. Bone-deep echo of loneliness that seems so achingly familiar. And a song. The light echo of a woman’s voice, ‘ _Hey there’_  she sings ‘ _you’re everything, a big Bad Wolf could want_.’

The moment fractures as images begin blurring past faster than I can process, blond hair, a deep pit, a voice without sound and then, nothing.

***

The Doctor retreats so fast that the return to my body leaves me reeling. I gasp, sinking to my knees against the wall as I try to hold onto the ghost of memory. A color, a gentle voice, words that must be so important, but they’re gone, like smoke drifting through my grasping fingers. The harder you try to hold a dream once you’ve awoken, the faster is slips away.

Gathering myself, I look up at the Doctor. Whether he found what he was looking for, I cannot tell. He’s closed himself off behind a blank mask and shuttered eyes. Without a word the sonic commands the lock open. As soon as the shutters whisper aside, he tuns on his heel and walks away, accelerating past the crew calling after him, out of the control room and well into the hall before I have my feet under me to follow.

Footsteps echo after mine as I begin to run, chasing one last glimpse of the man I know is about to disappear. I catch myself against the doorway leading into the loading bay; the doctor has the TARDIS unlocked and is pushing his way inside. I could catch him, am fast enough to close the distance but I make no move to follow, leaning heavily against the sturdy wall as the universe spins around us. He turns upon the threshold, hand on the door ready to close it, and meets my eyes across the cluttered space.

His face is blank still, but the Doctor’s eyes are another story; shining with unshed tears, otherworldly bright against the shadow of his brow. His lips part after a moment but he stays silent. I don’t know what he saw in me, but it has clearly shaken him. The Doctor is in pain, and it had caught him by surprise; as though an old wound he had almost forgotten had suddenly been ripped wide. He looks torn, part of him wanting to stay and puzzle out the mystery of me, of whatever seems to be connecting us that I am struggling to remember. But he does not want to face the pain that comes with it, perhaps doesn’t know how to and I know he is going to run. As he always does, as he always has, and likely always will. He can’t run far enough nor fast enough to get away. But he’s going to try.

The footfalls are a growing clamor as they close the distance between us, and he glances past me. He’d better go now, I realize, before they can catch up and try to keep him here.

“Go on Doctor. I’ll get them home.” A tear spills over onto his cheek, breaks against his lapel. I offer him a small smile and a gentle wave as he steps back into the waiting glow of his home. I watch the door swing shut on the Doctor’s face for the first, and probably the last, time. The TARDIS’ song fills the air and I wonder if he’ll ever recognize the sound for what it is: his Old Girl singing for him as she spirits him away.

The darkness of the cargo hold is stifling, without her gentle glow.

I wait until the last echoes of his presence fade from the fabric of this place and turn to face the living.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for sticking with it, especially since this is heavily original character driven. Any and all feedback and/or criticism is greatly appreciated.  
> No relationships in this piece, but the overall intent is for this to become part of a collection, evolving to include the wonderful Captain Jack Harkness, the beautiful Bad Wolf, and of course a future Doctor.


End file.
